Camaro Z28 Headlight Upgrade: Hella 90mm Projector Low Beam
and Reflector High Beam
For all of you
that are looking for a way to improve those crappy headlights on our cars, here
is something I found and installed on my car. The difference is amazing, it feels like you were driving with your sunglasses
on all those years! Plus it looks pretty cool on the Camaro's
I was looking
around for some better lights, but wasn't too thrilled about the idea of the PIAA's. First they are kinda
small, then they are really driving lights, so how good a low beam can that
give you? As far as light distribution goes, you can’t beat projector
headlights, I found these (Susquehanna Motorsports):
General Description of the
Units:
-Low Beam:
The low beam
lights are projector type headlights. They use H9 bulbs (see description
below). Here are some photos that show the beam
pattern: very sharp cutoff characteristic of the projector head lights. The difference
is pretty spectacular, you can actually see the road
now! (without blinding anybody and they are perfectly
legal, DOT approved etc...) Some people were also able to fit a D2S HID bulb in
these lights with just a little filing of the base plate that is detachable. So
if you want real HID, this is the best way to go in my opinion. I stuck with
the halogen bulbs since they already provide that much more light. Plus, the
HID ballasts etc. are pretty expensive. I also wanted to see if I could fit them
on the car first, who knows what i'll do later, but
this is already a 1000% better than stock.
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UPDATE: I modified two new H9 low
beam projectors to HID and fitted them to my car. It took a
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The gold
colored screws are the mounting/adjustment screws. The housings are mounted
with them and serve as adjustment screws at the same time. They supply a little
plug that holds in a hole that you drill in a flat plate much like an anchor to
hang something on the wall. The screw then "clicks" in that plug and
that's it, sits tight! There are 3 screws on each light,
I did two on the bottom and one on the top, because those were the places where
I could drill a hole in the headlight bracket without interfering with any
stiffeners. That way you use the bottom screws for left/right adjustment and
the top screw for height adjustment.
-High Beam:
The high beam
lights are reflector type headlights. They also use the same H9 bulbs as the
low beams. The improvement was not as spectacular as the low beams at first,
but I noticed that they just need some more careful aiming, which is a little
harder to do for the high beams since they don't have very clearly defined beam
features to use as a reference. Once correctly aimed (I'll get to that later)
they are pretty impressive! Mounting is the same as for the low beams.
-H9 Bulbs:
H9 bulbs
produce about 2600 lumen at 14 V (compared to 1000 with the stock bulb). Sidenote: a D2S bulb (HID) produces 3200 lumen, only 23%
more). So it's more than twice the amount of light combined with MUCH better
optics, you do the math! Since you can't really get these H9's at your autozone around the corner yet, I bought 2 spare bulbs. I
suspect that the availability will change soon, as these are meant to be used
more and more in new cars as the H9, H10 and H11 series lights. Got this info from the OSRAM and PHILIPS website. Besides
these bulbs have a nominal life that is MUCH longer than those sealed beam
pieces of crap. Susquehanna Motorsports carries them in stock, so you should be able to
get them relatively quickly.
The H9 bulb is
only 65W, the same as your stock high beams, so you can wire directly to the
stock wiring using the H9 connectors.
-Road
Illumination:
The low beam
pattern is really a sharp flat horizontal cutoff line with a small offset in
the middle (the right hand side is a little higher than the left side and there
is a sloped part in the middle). The lighting is really very uniform from side
to side and has a nice and wide beam.
|
Low Beam |
High Beam |
-Still to do
(for me):
Here are a
couple of things that I still plan on doing to improve the look:
- Put some kind of plastic cover around the lights
at some point to kind of fill in the empty part that you get with these
round lights. The look of a round headlight was actually the only thing I
wasn't really sure about. That was actually the reason I did not like the PIAA's. Now that they are in there, I really like the
looks!
- Put some clear covers in front of the lights to
finish the look.
What you'll need:
I bought my
lights from Susquehanna Motorsports in PA. The lights are
called "90mm low/high beam module for custom applications"
I bought the
following:
2 low beam
housings ($54/ea)
2 high beam
housings ($54/ea)
5 H9 connectors
(in case I messed one up) (~$5/ea)
2 spare H9
bulbs: since you can't really get these H9's at your autozone
around the corner yet ($15/ea)
Total cost was
about $270 including shipping. It may be a little cheaper if you order all at
once, because I did this in two stages lows first then highs. This is including
10% off that I got because it was a special offer between thanksgiving and christmas. I was considering PIAA’s and they are over $200 a set (2), so this is a lot
cheaper.
Installation:
Installation is
not bad at all, once I figured out how to do it (4 hrs), I did the second one
in about an hours worth of work. With this write up, anybody should be able to
do the installation in a couple of hours. I wanted to keep the option open to
revert back to the original lights (now I wonder why but maybe these will be
collector cars someday and then you would want it all original... who knows?) I
also wasn’t sure whether I would be able to make it work, so I wanted to be
able to call it off and put the stock stuff back on.
Paul 94 Z M6
from www.camaroz28.com mounted them with a
custom bracket. I wanted to be able to go back to the stock lighting if I
wanted to, so I mounted them to the stock bracket without messing with the
mounting points of the stock lights.
Also worth
noting is that the mounting frame that needs to be filed to fit the lights is
REALLY easy to do with a hand file, it's pretty soft actually. I got a Dremel kit for Christmas that I used for the high beams,
and that worked even faster, went through there like butter.
-Low Beam:
When I was doing
the low beams, I did not take any pics during the
install because (as far as I knew then) nobody else had ever put these lights
on, so I was just trying to fit them. Then I took some pics
afterwards and I remember pretty good what I did
because it wasn't that much that needed to be modified. It's basically
summarized in the photos below
TOP VIEW:
The red line is
the outline of where the stock bracket edge was. I tried to cut as little as
possible to keep as much rigidity as possible in the bracket. With the sharp
cutoff that these lights have, a little vibration in the light is gonna drive you NUTS!
Anyway, just
cut out the outline out of the top plate. Then take a little slot out of the
bottom of the stock opening in the top plate. This is to make room for a little
notch on the light.
FRONT VIEW:
You will also
need to move the stock adjustment out of the way or remove it completely. I
just removed the bottom screw and rotated it a little, that
gave me just enough room to mount the light. The screw is a pain to get to (I
found it easiest to get to it from the bottom) and is also some odd size that I
did not have a socket for at the time and I had to go back and forth to the
store to finally get it out. In this picture you can see that I removed the
high beam adjustment completely. You also need to remove one of the
"ears" as indicated in the picture. You really only need three of
those to mount the light anyways, I chose to put two screws on the bottom and
one on the top. This makes the side-to-side adjustment a little harder, but the
vertical aiming a little easier.
Behind the low
beam, there is a square opening that is similar to the one shown here for the
high beam. You will have to make that opening a little bigger. I think I took
off about a 1/4" on all 4 sides
Now that you
have made enough room for the lights, check if you can fit them in there. If
you are satisfied with their position, mark where the holes need to be with an
awl or something long and sharp by sticking it though the mounting holes on the
lights and marking the bracket. Then drill three holes in the places you
marked. I don't remember the size of the holes, but just look at the tabs that
the screws will pop in, they need to hook into the hole and be nice and tight.
Just one tip
up front:
put the screws on the lights and then pop the tabs on the screws, and only then
insert the light with screws and tabs into the holes. If you try to put the
tabs in the holes first and then push the screws in, the tabs will break! Take
my word for it!
In the end, it
should look like this.
-High Beam:
Mounting the
high beams was actually about the same effort to install as the lows. I thought
it would be easier because of more room available and the lights being smaller.
But the fact that it's smaller makes that the bulb connector in the back is
just in the opening in the frame, so I had to grind a lot of plastic away to
make room for the connector.
After you remove
the stock high beams, it should look like in the picture on the right. On the
left is the adjustment of the stock high beam, I just left it there, because it
is not in the way. On the bottom, you see the screw that is holding on to a
little tab of the horizontal part of the bumper. Both the screw and the tab
need to be removed to allow the horizontal piece of the bumper to be pushed
down. It is easiest to remove the screw from the bottom.
The flat bottom
part of the hole needs to be removed to make room for the connector. The hole
also needs to be made a little wider, so the sides also have to come off.
Finally, a slot needs to be made from the hole downwards to allow room for the
connector.
Here you can
see how the tab and screw are removed.
In the end the
hole should look like shown in the two pictures on the right. In the bottom
picture you can see what an H9 connector looks like. You can alos see the mounting holes that I drilled (two on the bottom
and one on the inside top)
The mounted
light looks like this.
Alignment and Adjustment:
The alignment
is actually VERY easy! You just turn the three mounting/adjustment screws to aim
it. Believe me or not, but that was the easiest part. Probably easier than
adjusting the stock lighting, you can easily get a screwdriver on there and
adjust it. I recently found a good website that describes how to accurately
(and legally) aim your headlights. These lights are coded VOL (this is
important to know because there are 3 different aiming procedures depending on
the coding). Follow the link for a complete description. Here, I am just giving
some clues as to how this aiming procedure applies to these
lights.
In summary:
Vertical: You're supposed to
adjust the left portion of the beam (that is lower) to the usual 2.1"
below horizontal at 25 ft. The only interpretation you have to make with this
procedure is what the top of the beam is. When you look at the beam pattern
from these lights, you'll see that there is a band of kind of
"orange" colored light above the cutoff. I have found that if you
adjust the light aiming the whiter part fo
the beam like described above, they are a little on the high side. I then
adjusted the top of the "orange" band to the correct height and I
think it is perfect.
The high beams
are a little harder to aim because the reference points in the beam pattern are
less distinguished. However, I noticed that there is an area of less light on
the bottom of the beam that has the form of the top half of a narrow ellipse
(almost like a pie with one piece missing on the bottom). I adjusted the top of
the "missing piece" to the same height as the low beam. This should
result in an almost seamless match of the low and high beam patterns.
Horizontal: The point where the
cutoff starts to slope upwards should be aimed straight ahead.
I adjusted the
high beams so that the top of the "missing piece" is pointing
straight ahead.
Here's a
general link to Daniel Stern's website, very useful info there on all aspects
of automotive lighting:
Daniel Stern Lighting.
Let me know if
you have any questions!
Sam
(Sam95ZNoTop on www.camaroz28.com ) or
Email: mullersa@bellsouth.net